English church rejects female bishops

Proposal could not get the two-thirds majority needed for adoption

By Alan Cowell and John F. Burns THE NEW YORK TIMES

LONDON 
In a sign of deepening crisis in the Church of England after it rejected the appointment of female bishops, its spiritual leader said Wednesday that the church had “undoubtedly lost a measure of credibility” and had a “lot of explaining to do” to people who found its deliberations opaque.

The archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, was speaking after an emergency meeting of bishops called to debate Tuesday’s narrow ballot by its General Synod rejecting the ordination of women bishops, even though women priests account for one third of the Church of England clergy. Women priests hold senior positions like canons and archdeacons and some had been hoping to begin to secure appointments as bishops by 2014 if the change had been approved.

The vote appeared to represent a direct rebuff to Williams’ reformist efforts during his 10 years as head of the church and a huge setback to a campaign for change that has been debated intensely and often bitterly for the past decade.

More than 70 percent of the 446 synod votes Tuesday were in favor of opening the church’s episcopacy to women. But the synod’s voting procedures require a two-thirds majority in each of its three “houses”: bishops, clergy and laity. Although the bishops and clergy met that test, the vote of lay members was a wafer-thin six short of a two-thirds majority.

The Church of England is the so-called established church, meaning that it is recognized by law as representing the official religion, enjoys special privileges and is supported by the civil authorities.

Some lawmakers suggested Wednesday that the synod vote would create a crisis of church-state relations since the rejection of female bishops contradicted national laws on gender equality. Prime Minister David Cameron, already at loggerheads with the church over the government’s plans to legalize same-sex marriage next year, urged church authorities Wednesday to devise a way out of the impasse.

“I’m very clear the time is right for women bishops, it was right many years ago. They need to get on with it, as it were, and get with the program,” he told Parliament on Wednesday. “But you do have to respect the individual institutions and the way they work while giving them a sharp prod.”

Addressing the synod Wednesday in unusually unambiguous language, Williams declared: “We have, to put it very bluntly, a lot of explaining to do.

“Whatever the motivation for voting yesterday, whatever the theological principle on which people acted and spoke, the fact remains that a great deal of this discussion is not intelligible to our wider society.”

“Worse than that, it seems as if we are willfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of that wider society,” he said, seeming to acknowledge criticism from within its ranks that the church — already facing dwindling congregations — is losing or has already lost a broader relevance to modern society.

“We have as a result of yesterday undoubtedly lost a measure of credibility in our society,” he said.

“Everyday that we fail to resolve this issue to our satisfaction, the satisfaction of the Church of England, is a day when our credibility in the public eye is likely to diminish,” he said. “We can’t, as I said yesterday in my remarks, indefinitely go on living simply theologically with the anomaly of women priests who cannot be considered as bishops.”

The archbishop is to retire next month after spending much of his time as the senior bishop of the Church of England and symbolic head of the Anglican Communion devising complex compromises intended to prevent a schism between reformers and traditionalists.

“Yesterday did nothing to make polarization in our church less likely,” Williams said Wednesday.

The archbishop has already acknowledged failing to accomplish a lasting reconciliation but the vote Tuesday seemed to rob him of a final opportunity to salvage something of a legacy.

“Very grim day,” the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop’s recently appointed successor, said in a Twitter message overnight. “Most of all for women priests and supporters, need to surround all with prayer & love and cooperate with our healing God.”

Both Williams and Welby support women bishops. The ballot on Tuesday left Welby to take over a church seemingly unable to resolve an issue that is only one of the contentious debates relating to gender and sexuality.

Since the English church split with Rome under Henry VIII nearly 500 years ago, only men have served as bishops, and the outcome of the two-day synod was seen by both sides as a watershed in the wider struggle over the Church of England’s future.

In the closing passage of the synod debate, a leading minister of the Church of England, Canon Rosie Harper, said a rejection would “inevitably be seen as the act of a dying church.”